Top Hook (50 page)

The lead Flanker was just visible and turning to get his radar on Snot, now extending off to the west. Donitz throttled down and turned in on the lead. The lead plane seemed to hesitate and then fired a missile and turned away, the missile losing lock immediately as the radar came off its target.

New guy
.

“Take the trailer.”

“Got him.”

Donitz turned, conserving speed by losing altitude without pushing his throttle. He wanted the other pilot to beat him around the circle. The lead Flanker was turning away from Snot, turning hard to the east. He already seemed to have forgotten that Donitz was there, above him and covering Snot's backside. His own turn was to the west, just far enough to get a tone on Donitz's AIM 7 Sparrow missile. Donitz fired one and then followed the Flanker, turning back to the north as the other's hard turn away from Snot leveled off. At the end of his turn, his opponent was low on speed and low on options, and Donitz's S-turn
had kept the radar-guided missile in aspect all the way home. Way late, the enemy pilot woke up to his danger and pumped chaff, breaking back to the east and diving to get the speed he had wasted in the turn. Donitz gave his plane more power and followed him down, now almost perfectly behind him and four miles away. The Sidewinder growl told him that he had an ideal IR missile shot. He let it growl.

The enemy pilot never got enough angle of separation between his plane and the chaff to matter. The AIM 7 blew a chunk out of the starboard engine nacelle and shredded the starboard vertical stabilizer. Donitz watched the enemy plane shudder, stand on its nose for a second, and then begin a tumbling fall. He saw the pilot eject.

“Scratch one Flanker.”

Snot had passed through a merge with the second Flanker in a hail of missile fire that left both planes intact, each turning and dropping chaff and flares against his adversary. Donitz, higher and with energy and time, thought he still owned the second guy. He turned west and descended. Snot turned left, across the sun, and reached for altitude.

“They're Chinese!” Snot barked as he turned.

The second enemy pilot was not a neophyte. He didn't follow Snot across the sun and into Donitz's waiting missiles. He didn't waste IR missiles on a target backlit by the rising sun. He completed his turn to the east and immediately went to full power as he pulled his nose up and back to the west, leaving a perfect S-shaped contrail behind him as he gained speed and left Snot right out of the fight. Snot continued his turn, looking for a long-range tail-on engagement, his head snapping back and forth trying to get a visual, his RIO calling out
the range, but by the time he had the tone his opponent had passed the range limit.

Donitz still had the altitude and the energy. Always the patient hunter, he waited until the second Flanker was fully committed to the second half of his S-turn and followed, again killing his speed to stay above and behind the other plane. His nose was too high to have the tone, but, having gained the position he wanted, he pulled back on the stick, pushed forward on the throttle, and felt the rush as the gravity rose like a wave of epoxy to trap his body, and his vision tunneled.

He began to see stars. He could only guess what the other plane was doing. Snot's RIO was calling numbers to him, guessing that he was graying out.

Donitz held the turn. He wanted to pass behind the guy and surprise him, turning back hard and catching him as he ended his turn. He passed some invisible line in his mind and changed the angle of his turn. He should now be approaching the other's port quarter.

Tone.
Grrrrooowllll
.

“Fox Two.” Spoken with enormous effort.

With afterburners like solar flares against the cold western sky, the Sidewinder had no difficulty tracking. The second Flanker went up in a single white flash, her fuel or another weapon ignited by the little IR missile. There was no parachute.

“Hey, that guy was mine!” Snot sounded indignant.

Donitz slowed his turn and pushed in the throttle, letting his vision return to normal while his RIO searched the sky to the north for more planes. They were low on both fuel and missiles, and a second flight of Flankers would be a catastrophe. He thought of the second guy's perfect S-turn and the blinding flash as his plane went up. A real pilot.

Dead.

“Shut up, Snot.”

Rafe heard the engagement develop, followed it with body English until it ended, and realized he had turned his own plane slightly north while his attention was focused on the fight. The coast was only a few miles away.

“Ranger One, what is your fuel status?”

“Below one thousand.”

“Coming to you.”

Rafe completed the inadvertent turn to the north and went to full power, diving slightly to lose altitude and gain speed. The other S-3 had only a few minutes to reach him, and Rafe had to effect a join-up without making the other plane maneuver or climb. And Stevens would have to hit the basket the first time.

Somewhere above him and well to the south, the E-2C updated the datalink and gave him the picture. No apparent enemy aircraft. Ranger One was twenty miles to the north and crawling toward him, very low. He continued his dive, aiming a mile to the east of the other S-3 to give him space for a single sharp turn to match direction and speed. He'd use the tight turn to dump velocity. At the same time, he was registering that the Tarheel flight had to be low on gas and munitions and that he needed more shooters to cover the refueling. He was also aware that he was now over Pakistan and thus in defiance of orders and international law, and that bringing up more Tomcats and Hornets could be viewed as escalation. The admiral was a long way away.

“Contacts bearing 005, 180 miles.” The E-2 was on the ball. A hundred and eighty miles was beyond the AWG-9 radar range.

“Tarheel, break off. Gunslingers, cover our refueling.”

Forty miles behind him, two more F-14s turned out of their combat air patrol position and raced for the coast of Pakistan. Donitz's flight turned away from the oncoming contacts, well beyond their range, and headed for the tankers. And all along the Pakistani coast, surface-to-air missile sites began to come on line. Campbell, Rafe's TACCO, began to reel off numbers.

Rafe had an EA-6B and a flight of F-18 Hornets ready to suppress the SAM sites, but, once they started shooting at Pakistan, there would be no hope of avoiding war.

Soleck saw the SAM site come up off to his left and put the MARI radar on it. Mr Craik had told him that surface ships often mistook the high-intensity beam for targeting radar; it seemed possible that a SAM operator would make the same mistake.

He hit the button for image mode. The fuel fell below five hundred pounds.

Rafe reached the point he had mentally designated for his turn.

“Hang on!”

He pulled the plane as if he was entering the break over the carrier and going for a shithot okay on his landing. He kept his hand steady on the throttle, watching his airspeed all the way. He was looking to exit the turn at one hundred eighty knots, just fast enough to pass over the other S-3 and then slow to match speeds. Stevens was right there, right where Rafe wanted him to be, and steady as a rock.

“Extend the hose.”

Alan's S-3 had a scorch mark running up the fuselage
from the tail section, and a wiring harness trailing like the tail on a kite. Then they were gone, hidden under Rafe's wing. Rafe sideslipped a fraction toward the other plane and throttled down.

Stevens watched the tanker from a mile away; the beautiful turn to join, the fractional sideslip to gain the perfect position. He flashed a glance at the fuel. Effectively, empty. One shot at the basket, which was coming, coming,
there
.

Stevens added a fraction of power, pulled the nose up a hair, added a little more power, and slipped a foot to the left. It looked right. It was right. He nudged the throttle, the plane gave one leap like the last surge of a wounded animal, and the probe slammed into the basket and caught. JP-5 streamed down the line. Soleck was looking at him with enough adoration to soothe any ego ever formed. Stevens's hands were steady as a rock, but his left knee had developed a tendency to tremble. The fuel gauge started to register the new gas.

The SAM site had gone offline. The Indian Ocean was visible even from their fraction of altitude. They had fighter cover and they had gas, and, suddenly, Stevens realized that they were going to make it.

In the CNO's map room, Rose watched the two new contacts turn away on the big screen. Behind her, there was a babble of voices; the CNO talking to the President, various cockpit voices from the air far away, the low murmur of aides dealing with other crises. The CNO put his phone in its cradle and avoided her eye.

“Package is back over international water,” a short,
stocky woman with gold wings and full commander's stripes announced. The sound levels increased, like applause at a game heard on a radio in a distant room. It didn't touch her. She got to her feet and moved toward the CNO, who was standing with the DNI and another admiral she didn't recognize. The stocky woman pushed a cup of coffee into her hand.

“Drink that. He'll be okay.”

“Thanks, ma'am.” Rose had forgotten that she, too, wore the three broad strips of gold that marked a full commander. She sipped the coffee.
The universal Navy cure.
It tasted like ship's coffee; bitter and old. Her husband was, she knew, “weak and not responding, due to loss of blood
.
” That much had come from the S-3. And that was all she knew. The voice that had reported it had sounded very young.

The big blue screen that had held the drama of the fight over Pakistan was empty now. Everyone else had lost interest. The crisis was over, or rather, it had given way to a new set of crises; the Chinese reaction, the justifiable squawks from Pakistan.

When the screen became active again, her coffee cup was empty, and the screen showed another battle group, this one in the Taiwan Strait. There, surface ships were holding contact on a submarine that was too close to the carrier. There, that same carrier had a strike package on deck to deal with the Chinese missile sites that were poised to fire on Taiwan. There, a Chinese surface action group seemed ready to exchange missiles with the American carrier and her escorts, an incredibly one-sided exchange. China would lose every exchange on the map, but had, until now, behaved as if she could prevail by willpower alone. And once the missiles started to fly in the Taiwan Strait, the world would never
be the same. It was twenty minutes until the expiry of the Chinese ultimatum to India.

George Shreed had brought them to this: her husband bleeding in the back of an S-3, her country at the brink of a war that would devastate continents. They were to the point that a single bad turn by a pilot, a single missile launch over Taiwan, would act like the first particle slamming into an atom. The reaction would be nuclear.

She stood apart, small but perfectly straight, the empty cup forgotten in her left hand. Her eyes followed the action in the Taiwan Strait on the screen, but her whole being was focused on a single plane far to the east, now throttling down from a straight-in approach to a steep angle of descent. She couldn't see the trailing wiring harness, or hear the crash as the whole weight of the battered plane hit the deck. She couldn't feel the scorched tail hook grabbing at the three wire, the rush of the engines as they went to full power and then, as if grudging their voice, dying away slowly. The press of medics and crash crews who rushed the plane were invisible to her, too insignificant to be featured on the CNO's command display. She imagined it all, several times, and she imagined different endings, some with fire, some without.

Cheering woke her from her trance. The stocky commander hugged her and was replaced by another aide, who pumped her hand. Someone in front of her was pounding a table with his fist and laughing. She looked around. Whatever they were applauding, it wasn't the landing of one S-3. She looked up automatically at the big clock; it was one minute until the ultimatum expired.

“Pakistan's asking for a truce!” someone shouted in the passageway outside. “China blinked!”

Rose Craik wondered that the avoidance of a possible world war left her with so little response, but she fixed a smile on her face and continued to watch the screen. She knew, remotely, that Pakistan's request for a truce meant that China's ultimatum no longer had any teeth. China would be forced to back down on every television in the world. Inasmuch as her country and her service were safe, she was happy, in a detached way, but her soul was elsewhere.

Twice, she tried to sip from the empty cup. A tall figure moved into her peripheral vision, just to her right, and there was a hand on her shoulder.

“They're on the deck,” the CNO said. “Everybody on board is alive.” He was smiling, and the rest of what he said was lost in the rushing sound in her ears.